Many of my students are immigrants and bring their own incredible culture and educational backgrounds to the forefront. Accounting standards and financial markets differ country by country. Active conversations about trade talks with others from outside the US are fascinating. I enjoy learning from their experiences. By sharing your experiences, you are reliving what worked for you.
Your mentee is interested in what attributes and strengthens are needed in the workplace. Sharing your perspective validates your strengths and may even surprise you about how good you were at your job. Even in revisiting some past failures, you may be recognizing mistakes you can now correct.
I relived past failures, a good lesson to share with mentees. Letting them know how you dealt with a problematic trade-off can be helpful. For example, when sharing some of the opportunities I once had, I recalled the trade-offs I had to make. I had received an offer with higher compensation from another firm, but I wanted to stay if I could expand coverage.
It turned out I had made the better decision at the time. With hindsight, when speaking with my mentee, I realized a more in-depth view of my path and achievements. Teaching or advising others lifts my motivation for my field. Making time for others who want to learn from you reinforces any doubt of your worth. Transfering what you have learned in the past and helping others is exhilarating. Their enthusiasm is infectious and gives me energy. Hearing my students say that they appreciated my advice and their situation worked out feels good.
At college, I am part of a mentoring program on campus with several colleagues. We recently attended a conference recruiting students and faculty to join the expanding program. We all listened to each other expound on the various benefits we gained.
There was tremendous energy as we all recognized these good feelings. Mentors are part-cheerleaders, part-champions for their counterparts. It is sometimes easier to advocate for others. Studies show women are better advocators than themselves. In a workplace environment, I went to bat for my junior analysts to get them better raises, bonuses, and opportunities to travel to conferences. As their mentor, I knew how hard they worked at intense times. Teaching self-advocacy is essential.
I encourage my students to promote themselves. A big part of our mentoring relationship is to guide them toward understanding what differentiates a good student in and out of the classroom and readying them for their careers.
Teaching others to speak up is a big part of career development. P roviding coaching to others may stop you from pursuing your procrastination, according to a study. As a mentor, you are promoting the best version of yourself. While tracking other employees, you are likely to be more mindful of wasting time and avoid costly procrastination.
It may help you to prioritize your own professional goals. We are all looking for ways to improve our CVs and resumes. Effectively mentoring others is a skill to learn and practice. Mentoring programs are sprouting up in many environments and are found to be valuable ways to build communities.
If you have a set of competencies and can spend time helping others, it is an enriching experience. It is always good to meet new people, especially in your field. Cultivating your network may not necessarily be the motivating factor to be a mentor. However, good relationships are always good to have.
I have kept in touch with many people I knew as students or junior analysts. I enjoy following their paths to success and many achievements. Peer mentoring is where colleagues mentor each other and reverse mentoring is where the traditional mentoring relationship is flipped on its head.
And determining whether or not the person giving the feedback has your best interests in mind can lead to confusion. The relationship between you and your mentor is one grounded in honest self-appraisal and valuable guidance. It takes a more holistic approach to your development and includes personal and professional growth.
With the support of a mentor, mentees can stay focused on their career, gain confidence, attain goals, and expand their networks. Having a mentor leads to self-discovery and helps you continue growing your career. One of the main reasons for mentorships is for the mentee to set goals. SMART goals setting is an acronym that stands for:. One survey found that 93 percent of workers believed that goal setting was key to their work performance. For that reason, mentors are key to employee development.
By defining goals and creating smaller steps to get there, mentors help focus mentees on what they need to do to advance their careers. These goals are also a way to measure the success of the mentorship. Without goals, a mentee has no direction and no plan to get where they want to go. A mentor helps keep them on track and accountable for achieving their goals.
It provides the motivation needed for mentees to work at attaining their goals. Mentorships can cultivate leadership skills such as listening, compassion and giving and receiving feedback. Participants develop these skills by using them in the relationship. These soft skills are essential for career success. In a study of peer mentoring relationships at the University of Arizona, they found that formal mentoring programs led to the development of the following soft skills in students:.
They also found that they experienced increased self-efficacy and the ability to seek support when needed because of the peer-to-peer mentoring they engaged in. From this, we can gather that the ability to lean on someone else for guidance, support and to have one-on-one conversations with them will lead to the development of soft skills.
Here are some of our top suggestions for going beyond a mentoring program. Mentoring programs don't come without their challenges. Whether you're a program lead, a mentor, or a mentee, here are some ways to overcome the top mentoring challenges. One of the top reasons mentoring programmes fail is they run out of momentum. This guide features tips for organisations and participants to make sure mentoring doesn't run out of steam.
There is a plethora of research to support the business advantages that mentoring in the workplace has. Mentoring programs can be a lot of work, especially if you are doing it manually. A good mentoring program aligns with overarching business goals. Traditional mentoring programs usually pair senior leaders with more junior ones to support and help them grow within the organization.
The goal for this type of mentoring may be to increase promotion rates within the organization. There are other types of mentoring programs with different objectives. The table below outlines different objectives for mentoring programs and their corresponding key result:. To promote your mentoring program focus on getting leadership on board first. If leaders promote the program and speak to its benefits and importance there will be a trickle-down effect on the rest of the organisation.
Leveraging the enthusiasm of early adopters or popular mentors will drive word of mouth and excitement about the program. Many mentorship programs start with a kick-off party whether virtual or in-person where participants can see everyone else in the program. Mentees can scope out potential mentors and see that they are part of a larger company wide initiative which will encourage them to maintain the relationship. Finding mentors and mentees is the most exciting part of the process, but can also be stressful.
It can become a logistical nightmare to manually pair up mentors and mentees when your program grows beyond 10 mentors and 10 mentees. There are many advantages to using mentoring software. To create meaningful pairings between mentors and mentees identify qualities of good mentees and mentors and encourage them in all participants. Mentors and mentees with these qualities will easily build a relationship that is mutually beneficial.
To build a successful mentoring relationship you have to focus on each individual's goals for what they want to get out the experience. If a mentee wants to transition into a new department, say for example from marketing to sales, you may pair up the mentee with the head of sales and then support their relationship by encouraging them to talk through how to make that transition.
For that reason, providing questions that the mentee can ask their mentor is very helpful in shaping the types of discussions they have. Encourage them to ask questions like:. Successful workplace mentoring programs are built on the backs of successful mentoring relationships. More importantly, participants and the organization will get the most benefits from a mentorship that has a strong relationship at its core.
Reporting on your mentoring program is essential because you want to capture the results of the relationships you helped develop and present that to stakeholders like leadership or other employees who are considering if a mentoring relationship is worth it.
To track feedback and measure your workplace mentoring program Together provides feedback forms at the end of each session for both the mentor and mentee to fill out. This gives meaningful qualitative feedback for administrators to understand if the program is working and what to change if necessary.
Important factors to keep in mind when evaluating the feedback from participants and monitoring your program include:. To ensure a successful workplace mentoring program administrators should keep their finger on the pulse of all pairings and make adjustments as needed. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, virtual mentoring can be more effective because it requires less logistic hassle like deciding where to meet and what to bring.
Instead, mentors and mentees can commit to a weekly or monthly schedule of conference calls where they check-in and dive into giving and receiving mentorship. One of the primary difficulties of remote or hybrid workers is isolation.
To combat this, companies will organize group events like happy hours or games nights. But after a day full of Zoom meetings many employees dread another call with the whole team.
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